Who is captain william fetterman

On December 21, , Pan Am Flight from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated in the General George S. Patton, commander of the U. He was 60 years old. Descended from a long line of military men, Patton graduated from the West Point Military Academy in He represented the Three weeks earlier, Presley, who wanted Live TV.

This Day In History. History Vault. Middle East. Art, Literature, and Film History. Sign Up. A relief party under Captain William J. Fetterman had been led into a trap that day; he and all eighty of his men perished in the worst U.

The Fetterman debacle occurred during the opening months of Red Cloud's War, an uprising by a coalition of northern plains Indians led by Lakota chief Red Cloud against the U. Army that continued until The bodies of Fetterman's soldiers were mutilated in the aftermath of the battle.

Carrington, gave a litany of atriocities committed: "Eyes torn out and laid on rocks. Noses cut off. Ears cut off. Chins hewn off … Entrails taken out and exposed. Hands cut off. Feet cut off. The Indians knew better. The area around the Powder River and the other southern tributaries of the Yellowstone River contained desirable lands. Game abounded—deer, rabbits, buffalo, birds. Down by the creeks, berries and greens grew. Nature had opened her bountiful hand and strewed a multitude of blessings.

The Crows, or Absarokas children of the big-beaked bird , called this area their homeland. But it had been the home of the Snake Shoshone Indians until they were driven out by the Crows in the early s, and since about midcentury, the Crows had been struggling with the Teton Sioux, who had moved in to escape encroaching white civilization. For the white men, this land was not considered valuable in , but not far to the west lay highly desirable land—the gold fields of Montana Territory.

A federal government nearly bankrupt from the Civil War urgently needed gold to liquidate the interest accruing on the national debt. Men desperate to escape poverty were willing to risk all. To travel from the East to the gold fields, the shortest route was to take the Platte Road the old Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie in present-day southeastern Wyoming and then pick up the Bozeman Trail, which had been pioneered by John Bozeman in the spring of When gold seekers used the trail in , Sioux leaders such as Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse and Red Cloud became upset, because the route passed right through their buffalo ranges.

To a lesser degree, the trail also annoyed the Northern Cheyennes and the Arapahos, who were friends of the Sioux. And soon, these Indians had even more reason to be angry. In late August , Brig. Patrick E. That outpost, however, would not be garrisoned until the next year. Indian attacks made travel on the trail extremely risky. Treaties were signed by various friendly northern Plains chiefs in the fall of , but other chiefs were determined to keep the Bozeman Trail closed. Into this sensitive situation marched American soldiers in , with orders to guard the Bozeman Trail.

They were the men of the 2nd Battalion, 18th U. Infantry Regiment. The troops left Fort Kearny near present-day Kearney, Neb. The regimental commander was Connecticut-born Colonel Henry Bebee Carrington, and he would be sticking with the 2nd Battalion. Major General John Pope, commander of the Department of the Missouri, had ordered the year-old colonel to staff Fort Reno and to build two additional forts farther north. One of the wives was Margaret Irvin Carrington, an educated woman passionately dedicated to life, justice and her husband, Henry.

She kept a journal of her travels and travails in the West. Hardly the stuff of a simple military maneuver. A stop at Fort Laramie in mid-June brought the ladies an opportunity to shop but carried ominous portents for the future. The whites, as usual, brought food and other presents.

Red Cloud—not actually a chief, but a head warrior who was highly influential in matters of war—and others did not. The arrival of Carrington and company did not sit well with Red Cloud.

The white men were asking for permission to use a road but had already brought soldiers to build forts along that road. Red Cloud and his Sioux delegation stormed off from the Fort Laramie negotiations; they vowed to fight any white man who used the Bozeman Trail. Still, the commission returned to Washington, D. The government negotiators had grossly underestimated the determination of certain Sioux to save their hunting grounds.

At Fort Laramie, some friendly Indians alerted Carrington to the possibility of trouble from hostile Indians in the Powder River country. And the colonel soon learned of other problems. The ammunition, horses and wagon drivers that were supposed to be made available to him at Fort Laramie were missing. But Carrington remained cautiously optimistic. On June 16, he wrote to Brevet Major H. Litchfield, the acting assistant adjutant general of the Department of the Platte, that he anticipated no serious difficulty: Patience, forbearing, and common sense in dealing with the Sioux and Cheyennes will do much with all who really desire peace, but it is indispensable that ample supplies of ammunition come promptly.

The next day, Carrington and the 2nd Battalion marched out of Fort Laramie with wagons. First, he stopped off miles to the northwest at Fort Reno, leaving behind one of his eight companies to garrison it; he then proceeded to a spot that appealed to him some 60 miles farther up the Bozeman Trail. Philip Kearny, who died in at the Battle of Chantilly Virginia. The fort would be stockaded and would sit on a natural plateau between Big and Little Piney creeks. The soldiers required only one morning to plot out the parade ground and building sites.

Almost immediately, various Cheyennes began to visit; they said that Red Cloud was insisting they join forces with his Sioux to drive the white men away. Openly hostile Indians, no doubt inspired by Red Cloud, also began to visit, with unpleasant consequences. Two men died in the first raid on July Attacks upon military and civilian targets in the region became commonplace.

Stock was lost. Timber parties, sent out in wagons to secure lumber for building the fort and wood for fuel and cooking, had to travel five or six miles to reach the pine trees in the Big Horn Mountains. These wood trains were often harassed by Indians. From Pilot Hill, a lookout post Carrington established just south of the fort site, men could watch the wagons move and signal when there was danger.

Alarms were constant; attacks upon the trains were frequent, and this kind of visitation continued during the whole season, Margaret Carrington wrote. The ladies all came to the conclusion, no less than the officers affirmed it, that the Laramie treaty was Wau-nee-chee , no good! Nevertheless, work on the fort progressed steadily, because there was no full-scale Indian attack. The daily routine for the women confined within its high walls differed radically from their lives in the East.

Only a few servants had come along, and many of them left for the more lucrative professions of baker and washerwoman for the troops. So the wives baked, cooked, cleaned, scrubbed and sewed clothing. Sometimes they found time during the day for croquet. Evening entertainment included readings, games, quadrilles and music.

Chapel came on Sunday. But there was never a sense of real peace. Every day brought its probabilities of some Indian adventures—every night had its special dangers which unanticipated might involve great loss, Margaret Carrington wrote. Her husband kept looking for the promised support. On July 30, he sent a long report to his boss, Brig. Philip St. George Cooke, who headed the Department of the Platte: My ammunition has not arrived; neither has my Leavenworth supply train—I am equal to any attack they may make, but have to build quarters and prepare for winter, escort trains, and guaranty the whole road.

Carrington was gaining a reputation as an alarmist, if not a coward. He had been a lawyer with business clients in Columbus, Ohio, before raising the 18th Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. A skilled administrator, he had held a series of staff jobs but had never fought with the regiment.